Eric Gay/AP Photo
Concertina wire lines the path as members of Congress tour an area near the Texas-Mexico border, January 3, 2024, in Eagle Pass, Texas.
On Monday, the leak factories in Washington reported that Senate negotiators had agreed on changes to immigration policy and were moving to lock in the funding provisions that would finish off the deal, which would trade the border changes for military aid for Ukraine. The Republican side was hailing “the most conservative border security bill in four decades.” The Democratic side announced that the work was “largely done.”
By Wednesday, the leak factories rolled out that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told his caucus in a closed-door session that “the politics on this have changed,” and that linking border enforcement and Ukraine was no longer viable. And so now, two days after the talks were 95 percent of the way to an agreement, they are effectively dead.
In between these two events, Donald Trump won the New Hampshire primary and continued his inevitable march toward the GOP nomination. Trump, the leak factories explain, wants to run on a lawless border in 2024, and this has upended any hope of getting a border/Ukraine swap. In fact, Trump explicitly opposes the deal. McConnell allegedly said in that meeting that he didn’t want to undermine Trump’s campaign, which improving the situation at the border would presumably do. (Senators with a vested interest in keeping the talks alive have rejected this interpretation.)
Of course, the idea that only a Trump victory stood between the Senate and this deal is just plain incorrect. Anyone paying a reasonable amount of attention would have figured this out weeks ago. This reporter, in fact, figured it out weeks ago, pointing out that “hard-line conservatives prefer having an ‘open border’ as an issue” in future elections. A couple of weeks later, I headlined “Republicans Don’t Want to Win an Immigration Policy Fight,” because they see more political value in keeping alive the appearance of crisis, all the better to wield as a cudgel against Joe Biden.
This was not a particularly difficult conclusion to reach, and it doesn’t have a hell of a lot to do with Trump, or at least not solely Trump. House Republicans were never party to the deal, the House would have to pass any deal in order for it to become law, and Republicans control the House. In fact, House Republicans had their own border bill, H.R. 2, which they passed with unanimous support from their caucus, and they loudly said over and over that H.R. 2 and only H.R. 2 would have to be the baseline to earn their support. Democrats have thoroughly rejected H.R. 2.
Therefore, any observer who isn’t ignorant of (a) the recent history of immigration politics or (b) how a bill becomes a law would have to discount any hope of a deal. But there’s a disturbing tendency to forget that the House exists when there’s a grand bargain to be chased.
Stepping back a bit further, the clear drivers on immigration in the Republican Party are the rank-and-file members of the Republican Party. The xenophobic right has been writing and shouting about McConnell, whom the leak factories have been relying on as the source of hope for an immigration deal, as a figure of betrayal, up to and including this week. The noise machine may have different motivations—politicians want the issue unresolved during this year’s campaign, while the base has broader anger at Republican leadership and a deep skepticism of any solutions. But the idea that this is top-down rather than bottom-up is gainsaid by how immigration policy has unfolded over the past two decades.
The clear drivers on immigration in the Republican Party are the rank-and-file members of the Republican Party.
There’s an attractive self-delusion that sitting outside a negotiating room and being fed scoops by powerful people about this or that twist and turn always contributes to public understanding. Often it does, and to be fair, there are people willing to pay for such political intelligence. But two seconds of thought in this case made hanging on to those crumbs from the negotiating room totally ridiculous.
The far bigger knaves are the pundits who never miss an opportunity to say “take the deal,” even when there is no deal to be taken. This reflects the general bias from the centrist punditocracy that Democratic leaders must attack their own party base in order to succeed. That made no sense here, for one simple reason: When the faction in Washington that’s closest to the actual views of the Republican Party on immigration isn’t even in the negotiations, whatever comes out of those negotiations is simply not going to pass, ever. I didn’t have to consult an oracle to divine that. But being right has no bearing on being a successful pundit.
So rather than focus on unrealistic grand bargains, let’s consider what Biden might now do. He’s not going to get his immigration deal and he’s almost certainly not going to get his Ukraine money, which is pretty incredible since by all accounts there’s still a working majority for that in Congress. Maybe there’s another vehicle to attach the Ukraine money to, but Biden is paying the price for adding border security funding to the Ukraine supplemental request in the first place, as an enticement for the right.
There was enough of a majority that didn’t need that enticement, and a clean request could lead to a clean passage today. Now it’s going to be hard to break that connection. The Pentagon surely has plenty of money, and the government has surely described the Ukraine war as critical to U.S. national security. But going from that to a formal allotment of funds without congressional approval is illegal, and the process in Congress on Ukraine is now broken. The war is on Europe’s doorstep, and eyes turn to Europe for what they will do to bolster Ukrainian forces.
Immigration is actually an issue where the president has a good deal of authority, even if Texas’s governor thinks he can ignore federal law. If Biden truly feels committed to the types of policies he was willing to give away in the Senate negotiations, he could implement many of them himself. He could declare a state of emergency, step up deportations, even tighten the standards for granting asylum.
The problem is that the main issue at the border is resources, for more asylum officers in particular. Further announcements of crackdowns without the resources behind them are unlikely to lead to a more orderly situation, and certainly won’t lead to that perception on TV screens tuned to Fox News.
The policy situation is difficult, but the unilateral resistance on the part of the GOP to do anything about it at least gives Biden a rhetorical boost to point the blame. If that was the administration’s thinking from the beginning, they were a couple of steps ahead of most of the political media.
